COLORADO SPRINGS, Nov. 15  The four ministers who assembled
here two weeks ago to decide the fate of the Rev. Ted Haggard
were facing a painful choice.

A male prostitute had accused Mr. Haggard, one of the nations
most prominent evangelical ministers, of engaging in a three-year
affair with him and of using drugs. Then, in a private emergency
meeting, Mr. Haggard promptly confessed to the ministers 
his handpicked board of overseers  that he had engaged
in sexual immorality.

Now, the question was, what punishment did Mr. Haggard deserve?
The board had two options: discipline him or dismiss him as senior
pastor of New Life Church. Could he take a leave of absence,
repent, receive spiritual counseling and return to ministry?

The answer became clear the next morning, the overseers said,
when Mr. Haggard gave an interview to a television news crew
as he pulled out of his driveway with his wife and three children
in the car. He denied having sex with the male prostitute, and
said he had bought methamphetamine but never used it. The overseers
said they watched Mr. Haggard, affable as ever, smile grimly
into the television camera and lie.

We saw this other side of Ted that Friday morning,
said the Rev. Michael Ware, one of the overseers. It helped
us to know whether this would be a discipline or a dismissal.

The Rev. Mark Cowart, another overseer, agreed. It was
a defining moment.

In many ways, Mr. Haggard had sealed his fate long before
the driveway interview by establishing a mechanism for accountability
in his church that gave a committee of his peers ultimate authority
to remove him. Years ago, Mr. Haggard had asked four of his closest
friends, all senior pastors of their own churches, to serve as
a board of overseers. They had only one function: if Mr. Haggard
was ever accused of immoral conduct, they would act as judge
and jury.

Until the scandal that drove him from the pulpit, Mr. Haggard
appeared to be a responsible steward and chief executive of New
Life Church and the adjoining World Prayer Center  an evangelical
empire that he built from nothing on a bare plateau with sweeping
views of the Air Force Academy and Pikes Peak. He was sovereign
over a 14,000-member church that answered to no denomination
and was in many ways built on his charisma.

Mr. Haggard spelled out his system of checks and balances
in bylaws that independent churches in the United States and
overseas have adopted as a model. All of our bylaws are
really set up to protect our churches from us, said Mr.
Ware, the senior pastor of Victory Church in Westminster, Colo.
The same bylaws Ted wrote were the same laws by which he
was dismissed.

Unlike the televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, who
became mired in sexual and financial scandals in the 1980s, Mr.
Haggards case was decided by his board with a haste that
stunned many church members and employees.

To watch his whole world evaporate in less than 24 hours
is one of the most humbling and God-fearing experiences Ive
ever encountered, Mr. Ware said in an interview over a
motel breakfast of little but coffee with two other overseers.

Mr. Haggard could not have picked overseers with more potential
conflicts of interests. Mr. Haggard, Mr. Ware and the Rev. Larry
Stockstill started in ministry together 28 years ago in Baker,
La., at Bethany World Prayer Center, where Mr. Stockstill is
now the senior pastor.

Another member of the board, the Rev. Tim Ralph, the senior
pastor of New Covenant Fellowship in rural Larkspur, has known
Mr. Haggard since he founded New Life Church in his basement
21 years ago. Mr. Ralphs son was a sound technician at
New Life for six years.

Three of the overseers have their own boards of overseers
at the churches they pastor, and Mr. Haggard was on all of them.

In 20 years, Mr. Haggards overseers had been summoned
only once, to investigate an accusation of sexual impropriety
that turned out to be a misunderstanding, overseers and staff
members said. A church member reported to the elders in 2001
that he had seen Mr. Haggard in the church offices embracing
a woman who was not his wife. The elders immediately called in
the overseers to investigate, and they found that the woman was
Mr. Haggards sister.

But the accusations that surfaced on Nov. 1 proved much more
serious.

Mr. Ralph said the accusations left the overseers holding
nitroglycerine in one hand. In the other hand, he said,
they held some very valuable life to the body of Christ,
referring not only to Mr. Haggard, but also to his wife, Gayle,
who directed womens ministries at New Life Church, and
their five children, ages 13 to 25. The Haggards eldest
son, Marcus, pastors a satellite congregation of New Life in
downtown Colorado Springs.

The overseers gathered the next afternoon in the offices of
the churchs lawyer, a bit stunned to be called into action,
said Mr. Ralph, who likened the assignment to his second job
as a firefighter.

You dont want to take the trucks out, he
said, you want to keep shining the trucks.

They reminded one another that despite their long ties to
Mr. Haggard, the Bible says they are to judge accusations without
partiality. On handheld computers, they pulled up another Scripture
that says two or three witnesses are necessary when determining
the guilt of an elder.

They considered the prostitute the first witness. When Mr.
Haggard confessed that afternoon, he became the second. Within
hours, he had resigned as president of the National Association
of Evangelicals.

He made it easy on us, said another overseer,
the Rev. Mark Cowart, the senior pastor of Church for All Nations
in Colorado Springs. We didnt have to sort through
everything.

Mr. Ware said Mr. Haggard told them: Ninety-eight percent
of what you knew of me was the real me. Two percent of me would
rise up, and I couldnt overcome it.

The harder decision was whether to dismiss him, but the overseers
said Mr. Haggards lie in the television interview had deeply
unsettled them. When they informed Mr. Haggard of their decision
on Saturday, they said, he told them they had done the right
thing.

The overseers also believed that Mr. Haggard needed more counseling,
oversight and accountability than they could provide. They asked
three of the countrys most renowned evangelical leaders
 the Revs. Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett and Dr. James
Dobson  to serve as a restoration team. Dr.
Dobson, the founder of the Focus on the Family ministry, soon
excused himself, saying he could not devote adequate time and
attention. He was replaced by the Rev. H. B. London Jr., a Focus
on the Family vice president who runs a division that counsels
clergy members and churches.

Mr. London said it could take at least three years before
a fallen minister was restored to spiritual,
emotional and physical health, with no assurance he could
return to ministry.

He said Mr. Haggards former congregation had rallied
around him, and church officials said they were negotiating a
generous severance package.

There are mixed views on how well the overseer system Mr.
Haggard put in place worked.

From what I can tell, it was handled very well,
said Mark A. Noll, a historian at the University of Notre Dame
who studies evangelicals. If the accountability procedure
is real, as this one seems to have been, it works well.

But Eddie Gibbs, a professor of church growth at Fuller Theological
Seminary in Pasadena, Calf., said Mr. Haggards accountability
structure was a failure. The flaw, he said, was that it provided
for intervention only when the pastor was about to crash and
burn, rather than establishing a process to check on him routinely
to prevent such an outcome.

Youve got to have the kind of people who will
ask the awkward questions about every area of life, Mr.
Gibbs said, especially if for a high-profile pastor in a large
church.

In the New Life executive suites, the Rev. Rob Brendle, Mr.
Haggards young associate pastor, who said he had thought
of himself as Teds Karl Rove, said he was so
traumatized he could not yet ask himself if had seen signs of
Mr. Haggards double life. But Mr. Brendle said he was comforted
by the smooth handling of the crisis.

I want everyone to see how evangelical Christians respond
during adversity, and how we treat our wounded, he said.
We arent interested in kicking someone to the curb
when he shames our movement. We are committed to serving him.

Last week, a young man working at the cafe of the World Prayer
Center stripped Mr. Haggards books off a shelf. Mr. Brendle
said he had approved the purge of books and of the sermon archives
on the Web site because he did not want people looking
for clues.

In his book Foolish No More, Mr. Haggard wrote
that lying about a sexual affair produces the stinking
garbage of a rotting sin.

If a church leader sins, he warned, everyone
within the churchs influence pays.

Key Evangelical Quits Amid
Gay Sex ClaimThe leader of the 30
million-member National
Association of Evangelicals, a vocal opponent
of same-sex marriage, resigned Thursday
after being accused of paying for sex with a man
in monthly trysts over
the past three years.

Haggard Dismissed Amid Sex
Scandal

The Rev. Ted Haggard
was dismissed
Saturday as leader of the megachurch he
founded after a board determined the
influential evangelist had committed "sexually
immoral conduct," the
church said Saturday.

This article is copyrighted material, the use
of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to
advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights,
economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc.
We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted
material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material
on this site is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information
for research and educational purposes. For more information go
to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes
of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission
from the copyright owner.